The upcoming Western Australian state election will feature quite a change to WA elections, with the upper house being elected at large as a single 37-seat election.
This has prompted a lot of uncertainty about what might play out. But actually there is quite a lot we can know about what is likely to happen. In particular, how well the various parts of the state will be represented in the new upper house.
Ben is joined by Martin Drum from the University of Notre Dame to discuss the new electoral system for the Western Australian Legislative Council and to look back at the last four years of WA state politics in the lead up to next month’s state election.
Today I’m announcing some work that was mostly finished at the end of last year but was put on hold until the new year, but is now finished.
I have now added a number of new datasets to my data repository covering elections held in the second half of 2024. These are:
British polling company YouGov published their first MRP report for the 2025 election cycle, becoming the second company to publish an MRP during this election cycle. For this post I wanted to run a comparison of the two most recent MRPs from two different companies. The two polls produced similar top-level figures, both in terms of seats and votes, but at the individual seat level there are some pretty significant differences.
Nominations closed on Thursday for the WA state election. The nomination information was published late on Thursday and on Friday night I finished publishing final candidate lists on my election guide.
Ben was joined by Shaun Ratcliff from Accent Research to discuss the state of play as the federal election year kicks off. They discuss the state of polling, including the MRP polls conducted by Shaun in conjunction with Redbridge throughout 2024.
Elections are held for Tasmania’s upper house every year, usually in May. I’ve now finished my guide to the three races to be contested this year. Read the guide here.
Two to three seats are contested each year, with all 15 up for election over a six year cycle. So this year’s seats are those contested in 2019.
6:00 – Polls have just closed for the two Victorian state by-elections in Prahran and Werribee. I’ll be following the results here tonight.
We are now just over a month out from the Western Australian state election. The writs will be issued tomorrow, and nominations close next week.
This seemed like the right time to unlock my state election guide for everyone to read. The guide has been an exclusive for members of the Tally Room who sign up via Patreon.
A by-election is incoming for the NSW north coast state seat of Port Macquarie.
This seat had previously been a safe Nationals seat, although it had fallen into independent hands in the 2000s. This changed in 2000, when sitting MP Leslie Williams quit the party over a dispute between the Coalition parties over koala laws, and joined the Liberal Party.
Williams was re-elected as a Liberal in 2023, despite a strong challenge from the local mayor as the Nationals candidate.